Saturday, April 09, 2011

"Ten": The Office (Part One)

In Metropolis, the shot of the skyscraper transitions to an office near the top of the building. To further steal, uh, I mean pay homage to the 1927 film, this is exactly what I'm going to do. We've seen the skyscraper already, so let's look at the office:

Impressive. And I wanted to duplicate that feeling with mine. I went through two different sizes for the base floor of the office before I arrived at 32 x 32, which was much larger than the previous two versions. Though the first two seemed to be large enough on a practical level, they simply didn't have the grandeur I wanted to communicate. Now that I have ended up making the room the size of a crater plate, this should no longer be a problem:

Incidentally, those four gray corner pieces with the holes in the sides were used for a reason, which I'll get to in a moment. For now, we need to add a a layer of black pieces to solidify the structure and then, on top of that, the brown pieces that make up my "wood floor". Like so:

This is another case of me being ridiculously anal. It's a black and white film, so you'll never see it as a wood floor because you don't see the brown. Next comes the bases for the walls, which are shown here:

Ah, but why did I build the base for the walls separately? This is why:

The four sides click into place and can be removed individually in order to place the camera for shooting. I used the same method for the Hypersleep room in Blast Reynolds and the town square in Tale of two Robots. With the time I had left this week, I built the walls up to the chair rail that extends all the way around the room:

I hope to have the room done by next week and not have to go into a "Part Three" with the blog posts. I still have some furniture to build, the remainder of the walls, the ceiling with lights and the sliding door mechanism. So I'm not done yet by a long shot.